Googling your backyard

Apparently, Google can (and will) go onto your property and photograph your yard/house/pool/trampoline. This has begun happening all over the country as Google "accidentally" drives their little camera-laden Google Street View vehicles all over your town and occasionally up your driveway. If this happens to you, you can sue Google to remove the images but that is only if you find out before others have seen it and copied the pictures.

My point in posting this is that if Google can get into your backyards, who else can?

See links below for a creepy view of some poor sap's home and yard.

[Gizmodo via smoking gun via consumerist]

RFID Link Collection

Check out this collection of RFID resources. The collection was created using Eluma, a social bookmarking application and RSS reader. Eluma is currently in private Beta but I have invitations.

Comcast Wants to Put Cameras In Your Home

Conspiracy theorists are going to have a field day with this story. In fairness, so will just about everybody else. We hope.

Comcast is experimenting with camera technology. More specifically, it trying out technology that turns cable boxes into camera-equipped devices that would utilize body-form-recognition as a means to provide custom-tailored service, and, of course, custom tailored advertising. The boxes would be able to tell who is in the room based on the shape of their body, thus tailoring programming to fit their specific desires and security settings (when children are involved). Facial recognition is not in the works as of yet.

We should be clear: This is all in the experimental phase. There has been no consumer testing and Gerard Kunkel, Comcast's senior VP of user experience, stresses that any final decision is predicated on the boxes providing more to the viewer than just precision advertising.

Custom Tailored. Security. Efficient. Your New Best Friend. Now You Can Leave the Kids At Home With Super Cable Nanny! Those are hypothetical buzz-words and -phrases Comcast will most likely lay on in hearty layers if and when it begins to roll out this new technology.

Honestly, what is your immediate gut reaction when you hear that a massive corporation might want to place cameras that actually track your movements in your own home? We won't say what we think. Trust your gut reaction and don't let any amount of mediocre advertising sway you.

[NewTeevee, Switched]

Tiny Camera Implants Turning Insects Into Spies

According to this week's New Scientist, the future of spying may rest in the hands (or legs) of insects and rodents. In an attempt to build the ultimate super(small)spy, moths, beetles, rats, pigeons and sharks have been installed with electrodes, batteries, and even video cameras.

"[A moth] may look like an innocent visitor, irresistibly drawn to the light in your room, but it could actually be a spy -- one of a new generation of cyborg insects with implants wired into their nerves to allow remote control of their movement."

These mechanized animals (read: cyborgs) have plenty of advantages over traditional robots. Sharks, moths and rats, for example, have an amazing sense of smell that allows them to detect the faintest traces of chemicals. And if humans can figure out how to hide the controls within the creature's bodies ... well, they would become perfect spy.

[switched, DailyMail]

Aaron Russo and Nicholas Rockefeller coversation about RFID Chip.

Live Inconvenient or Die

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

Thomas Jefferson, to Archibald Stuart, 1791
3rd president of US (1743 - 1826)